A reclusive photographer known as Disfarmer worked out of a modest studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas, making portraits of the surrounding rural community during the 1930s and 1940s. His sitters included cotton farmers, tradesmen, soldiers home on leave, and extended families. Made directly and without pretension, these pictures record a common bond that has largely disappeared. They are bold and sometimes confrontational, yet they hold the sitters’ humble grace and small-town charm. Many were handed down through generations and survive in family albums in the community; others were rarely seen or unpublished.

Twin Palms Publishers published this monograph in October 1996, with text by Julia Scully. For the book, Jack Woody returned to the surviving glass-plate negatives and chose 180. Contact prints were made from the plates, and the volume was printed on a sheet-fed gravure press in Kyoto, Japan, a specific stage in the movement from surviving negatives to the printed book. The book measures 7 by 10 inches and runs 208 pages, with 180 gravure plates. The hardcover gathers this selection into a single volume.

The photographs are emblematic of the post-Depression era, and together they form an uncanny record of American rural life and underscore a distinctly American vision of place. These are local studio portraits made for ordinary clients, yet the portraits are unsentimental and do not editorialize. Disfarmer showed his sitters frontally against a bare backdrop, letting posture, clothing, and faces carry the picture. Scully’s text accompanies the plates and addresses the photographer and his community.

For readers interested in twentieth-century American portraiture, this 1996 Twin Palms monograph is a concentrated gathering of Disfarmer’s work. The passage from glass negative to contact print and then to gravure is part of its material history, and the selection establishes the book as a coherent presentation of the surviving negatives.